The Network - Jason Elliot [62]
A week later he’s badly wounded by a mortar explosion and is flown out of the city by the International Red Cross. He’s paralysed and will live the rest of his life in a wheelchair. The news hits me hard. It’s as if he’s shown me my own fate.
I have no wish to abandon Orpheus, but it’s time to pull out, so after nearly two years I resign from the trust. Nothing can describe my feelings of devastation as I board a United Nations flight to New Delhi and circle away from the airfield at Kabul, where the surrounding fields are still littered with the debris of destroyed Soviet aircraft. My sense of ruin is complete.
I return to England. I am racked by feelings of guilt at what I have seen of a conflict to which the world is largely indifferent, and experience shock and loathing at the comforts of ordinary life back home. In Afghanistan I have lived surrounded by random death, destruction and misery of every kind, and am mystified at why people in England, a country at peace, seem so very miserable.
The Network’s operation in Afghanistan has died. There is nothing more that can be done. As time passes I make my peace with ordinary life, and my hopes of seeing Manny again harden into a knot of despair. I refuse to believe he is dead, and he haunts me like the phantom limb of an amputee. There is not a day that passes when I do not think of him. I know in the deepest part of myself that one day, somewhere, I will find him, or his corpse, and be free of this pain, which is like a barrier between me and life, and through which all my experience is unwillingly filtered. When I experience moments of joy, I wish Manny were there to share them; when I am stalked by misery, I think of the difficulties and loneliness he must be having to face. He is my closest friend. With Manny I have shared the unforgettable intimacy of being alive – not only with the personal intensity that war or a shared love can bring to a friendship, but with the greater and impersonal love born of being in the service of something wholly bigger than us both.
The Baroness offers me a new role. While I start my landscaping business, finding consolation in working with nature, I’m given the task of advising and instructing new recruits to the Network. In London I teach the rudiments of counter-surveillance and field codes to a small number of men and women who will operate in places I don’t know about.
One afternoon I’m in Selfridges to demonstrate the use of switchback escalators as a surveillance trap. The idea is to carefully clock the faces of travellers on a lower escalator, ‘trapping’ them into becoming visible. Part of good counter-surveillance is not giving any indication that you suspect you’re being followed, which means techniques like stopping to tie shoelaces or peering at reflections in shop windows are never really used, and the switchback configuration of escalators in big department stores is one of the few ordinary means to see who’s behind you without having to turn around in the manner of a fugitive. But life is so strange you couldn’t make it up. I’m just wondering about a good way to challenge the three pairs of young watchers trying to keep up with me when I spot a striking-looking woman on the escalator below. I follow her, deciding that I’ll demonstrate to my watchers impromptu techniques for getting the telephone number of a perfect stranger. I catch up with the woman I’ve chosen on an upper floor. She’s flicking through clothes on a rail, and already I’m thinking of a story about being a designer and how, if she loves those designs, she’ll love the line I’ve designed, which is about to be launched. But she’s unexpectedly beautiful, and has the predatory gaze of a panther, and I’ve already fallen under the spell of her feline power and grace. I make a joke about the colour of a dress she’s considering. She’s American, it turns out, and within a few seconds she asks me the question that takes English people months to get around